'The Return of ROTC to New York City'

Daniel Halper

Last month, the US Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) returned to the City College of New York after a 41-year absence. At the official signing ceremony last May, former secretary of state and retired general Colin Powell—arguably the college’s most famous alum and a graduate of Army ROTC—noted the significance of the reconciliation. In bringing ROTC back to campus, General Powell said, the college was recognizing that “we may disagree with the politics or the policies of it all but military service is honorable.”[1]

General Powell’s words were a reminder of ROTC’s tumultuous history at City College and its forced ouster during the firestorm of student protests over the Vietnam War. Like several other prominent schools—among them, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia University—City College had hosted one of the earliest ROTC programs in the nation, graduating its first class in 1917. But this collaboration ended during the Vietnam era after some schools voted to bar the college-based training program for military officers from campus.[2]Later opposition to US policy on gays in the military, particularly “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT), reinforced the schools’ bans and led to the removal of more ROTC programs, including at one of City College’s sister schools, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in the late 1980s and early ’90s.

Recent years have seen a softening in attitudes about the military among students and faculty. The attacks on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—as well as the upswell of new student veterans—led many at America’s colleges and universities to reassess their views of ROTC.[3] The 2010 repeal of DADT removed another obstacle to ROTC’s return. Thus, since 2011, with remarkably little opposition, official ties with ROTC have been renewed at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, and City College.

ROTC’s return also heralds an important change for the military. The anti-ROTC campaigns of the Vietnam era coincided with a shift by the military away from the Northeast and urban areas toward easier recruiting grounds in the South and the Midwest. Over the years, this policy has become more pronounced, widening the gap between Americans and their military. Nowhere has this disconnect been more evident than in America’s largest city, which, until recently, was served by just four ROTC programs.